“The expansion and contraction of arranged and improvised elements allows the original Baroque material to breathe authentically in our own time, resulting in a phantasmagoria whose haunting effects are only accentuated by ECM’s beautifully spacious recording.” – Gramophone, on Lislevand’s previous ECM release Nuove MusicheRead more />
• On Nuove Musiche, his highly successful ECM debut released in spring 2006, Norwegian master lutenist Rolf Lislevand led his own group of international early music virtuosi. The album presented ravishing and unorthodox accounts of mostly Italian instrumental music from the early Baroque. Based on Italian Renaissance sources from the 16th century – madrigals, chansons and virtuoso lute music – the new program goes even further back – from the “seconda pratica” of monophonic expressiveness to the “prima pratica” of polyphonic complexity.

• Once again putting a strong emphasis on improvisation, Lislevand and his colleagues disclose the astounding modernity and emotional wealth in the music of composers such as Giovanni Antonio Terzi or Joan Ambrosio Dalza. Most of the music stems from the Veneto region of Italy where, during that period, strong influences of oriental and eastern music could be felt. Lislevand’s group translates this with a lush scoring for deep instruments, both stringed and plucked. The album title Diminuito refers to the practice of virtuosic ornamentation of vocal lines, the “diminution” of larger rhythmic and harmonic units in most agile runs, scales and arpeggi. The album was recorded at the monastery of St. Gerold with a line-up including two of Trio Mediaeval’s delightful sopranos, Anna Maria Friman and Linn Andrea Fuglesth.

Games of Thoughts, Sounds and Structure

This recording is all about the Italian renaissance, how it understood itself, how we understand it today and how we would have understood it if we had been contemporary with it, because no other period in European music’s history was as contemporary with itself as was the renaissance. During the 16th century, humanistic inspiration had led to the most equilibristic levels in all arts and had stretched the human mind to the highest achievements and skills flourishing in a landscape of youth, spring and rebirth of all of mother earth’s beings.

Diminutions, divisions, or glosas were one of the renaissance’s unique inventions. Technically it means embellishing a melody into a much more flavored and elaborated melody in faster movement and shorter rhythmical values, presuming that the simple melody still remains in the listener’s mind. This supreme discipline of ornamentation became a new work of art in itself.

The original composition on the other hand was reduced to a humble servant of this invention – an object of abuse for an instrumental protagonist without further empathies neither consideration of its origin.

It is like the game of drawing lines through numbered points on the last page of newspapers: creating shapes and figures making lines from a number to another. Melodies are like these shapes and contours of a drawing, and each numbered point is the plucked sound, drawing lines from one attacked sound to another one, believing that a figure eventually occurs in our imagination!

The art of diminution almost completely denaturalized the plucked instruments in the same way it has done to the electric plucked instruments in our own days. The distorted sound of an electric guitar made it a bowed string instrument and changed all its musical logic. The diminutions allowed the plucked string instrument to regain some of the qualities of the human voice, the phrasing, coloring and dynamics. By means of fast and small melodic figures which make bridges and reinforce the shape of the simple melody, the lute suddenly appears as protagonist, soloist and conductor, wowing a patchwork of colors, shadows and lights and in a unique way adding value to the simple and beloved, but all to well known melody.

"Mr. Lislevand and company are period-instrument iconoclasts: invention, virtuosity and surprising combinations of timbre trump scholarly propriety in this vital, exquisitely played program of Renaissance songs and dances." -- Allan Kozinn, New York TimesRead less